Author
Topic: New User - Unable to Jog? (Read 2426 times)

I'm new to Mach3, and I've just ordered my first machine, a small CNC router. I would like to control it with Mach3. I don't have the machine yet, but I am trying to install Mach and experiment with it.

I've decided to try using a Thinkpad T42, mainly because I have one I'm not currently using, and I'd prefer a portable machine. I know I might have some trouble getting the parallel port to work nicely, but I will give the solutions presented in other posts a try and see what happens.

The part that's confusing me right now is that I'm having trouble getting Mach to respond in the way I think it should. I installed it on another machine (just to see if it would work), and I was able to install and then jog the axes and watch the DRO change. No configuration needed, etc. Then I installed on the Thinkpad. When I try to jog via the keyboard, and also when I open the onscreen MPG by pressing tab nothing happens. I can press the buttons but the DRO never change. I haven't messed with the configuration on this computer either, so I'm not sure why one works and the other doesn't.

So I know I'm probably missing something obvious, but what am I doing wrong? Should I be able to install and immediately jog? If that isn't working, where should I look?

Is the reset flashing? If it is you will need to change it to active high in Ports and Pins Inputs so that you can get Mach out of reset.If thats not theproblem then look and see if the Jog On/Off button has a green surround, if it doesnt click it.Hood

I should have been more explicit. Reset is green, and the Jog button is also green.

I'm pretty confused about all of this as I would have expected that if you install the same program on two different computers, neither of which connected to an actual machine, then they'd both act the same way. However I can jog on one computer, but not the other. Weird.

I installed it on another machine (just to see if it would work), and I was able to install and then jog the axes and watch the DRO change. No configuration needed, etc.

That seems unlikely. As Hood mentioned, you need to enable the motors to jog, and on a clean install, NO motors will be enabled. Either you enabled te motors, or you used an .xml that had motors enabled.

Aha, that seems to have been most of my problem. What I did differently on the initial machine was that I didn't create a custom profile. I ran the default MachMill profile, which seems to ship with motors enabled. On the second machine I created a custom profile called "TestMill" when I installed. That one didn't have any motors enabled. Thank you for that push in the right direction!

Funny little bug, I created the TestMill profile when I installed. I started to create a second profile but decided to cancel. When the install finished, I had two custom profiles - "TestMill" and "Cancel".